Mindbodygreen Slashes CAC 54% While Scaling Blended ROAS 23% with FERMAT Shops

Learn how mindbodygreen uses FERMÀT shops to max out CVR and AOV, all while keeping customer acquisition costs lower than ever. 

“When we discovered FERMAT, we were able to mimic the success of Meta Shops from a CAC perspective, but also optimize towards AOV, subscription rate, branded experience – all things that matter, and things that we couldn't tackle at all with Meta Shops.” - Ciara Ciez

About

Founded in 2009, mindbodygreen began as a lifestyle media brand centered on all things health and wellness. In 2021, the brand launched their ecommerce store, offering a variety of health and wellness supplements designed to “radically transform your health from inside and out”.

Challenge

Mindbodygreen needed to decrease CAC, while maintaining their first-time-purchase subscription opt-in rate.

In 2023, the mindbodygreen team knew they needed to find a solution for rising customer acquisition costs. They tested Meta Shops and were thrilled with the 20% CAC slash - but soon realized that this was not a long term strategy. 

“We had tested Meta shops. We were seeing really strong performance, conversion rate and CAC wise, but there are no customization levers. And we couldn’t offer subscriptions, which is foundational to our business. We were still driving primarily to our PDPs because of the subscription issue.” - Ciara Ciez

As with many other supplement brands, offering customers the ability to “subscribe and save” dramatically increases mindbodygreen's customer LTV. Meta Shops’ lack of ability to support subscription purchases was ultimately leaving a significant amount of money on the table for mindbodygreen.

Additionally, the team found Meta Shops largely inflexible when it came to experimentation and customization. Running critical conversion experiments - like testing pricing, bundling, and shipping thresholds - wasn’t possible. Meta lacked the ability to brand the shopping experience, too.

“Our CACs were high. We were doing onsite testing, but we were not getting enough movement to see CACs actually decrease. We tested into Meta Shops and saw CAC decreases, but we weren't able to offer subscriptions or optimize that experience at all to be branded or focus on any of the KPIs that we like to optimize to. " - Ciara Ciez

Solution

FERMÀT enabled mindbodygreen to keep CAC low and efficiently scale paid ad spend, while testing toward a variety of other core KPIs - CVR, subscription opt-in rate, AOV, and more. 

Ciara and the mindbodygreen team have now adopted FERMÀT shops as a core piece of their customer acquisition strategy. From leveraging shops for efficient creative testing, to using shops as a broader CRO sandbox, here are some of the strategies enacted that have been central to mindbodygreen's success:

Implementing FERMÀT as part of the creative testing process to improve paid ad spend efficiency: After running some initial FERMÀT shop tests with previously winning ad creative, the mindbodygreen team was able to quickly identify the key elements common across top performing funnels. Now, they test over 100 new creatives per week, launching a new FERMÀT shop for each creative test using a high-converting template, based on those core elements. The performance of these funnels helps to determine which creatives move on for further scaling, or are cut before ad spend is wasted. For their top performing creatives, the team then experiments sending traffic to different FERMÀT shop formats, such as advertorials. Using FERMÀT shops as a “baseline” for strong performance, the team has been able to efficiently scale top performing creatives while simultaneously cutting off spend to underperformers. 

Improving conversion rate by creating 1:1, congruent shopping experiences from each ad creative: In implementing FERMÀT shops, Ciara & the mindbodygreen team found a striking pattern - shops containing creative that is highly congruent with the ad creative pre-click convert significantly higher. By creating 1:1 funnels for each ad creative, the team has been able to maintain a consistently high conversion rate for each top-performing ad creative. 

Increasing the value of each customer through experimentation - particularly when it comes to subscription offerings: FERMÀT unlocked the ability to run a variety of post-click testing for the mindbodygreen team. Not only is the team able to offer subscription options through FERMÀT shops, but they’re also able to run experiments on the subscription offerings presented in order to maximize the value of each customer. MindBodyGreen quickly discovered that defaulting the subscription offer over the one time purchase option dramatically improved customer LTV – a tactic now implemented sitewide. They’ve also run a variety of experiments on bundle offerings, pricing and packaging, shipping thresholds, and more. Ultimately, the results of these experiments have led to gains in two core performance metrics - AOV, and LTV. 

‍Applying learnings from FERMAT experiences to mindbodygreen's core Shopify site, thus improving performance across all customer segments: As mentioned above, Ciara and her team have also been able to stress test a variety of different hypotheses before implementing sitewide. Not only does this include the testing of traditional elements - like defaulting to subscription or adjusting the shipping threshold - but also includes things like the phrasing of page headlines, product benefits, and more. “You can get learnings on what kind of headlines are resonating with people, what kind of features people are looking for, that kind of thing before you actually invest in the infrastructure on site,” Ciara said. The implementation of these learnings have since resulted in an overall improvement in mindbodygreen's ecommerce site performance.

‍“It's really easy to build out a test landing page, and then if you find that it's working, you can build that out on site, which I think is appealing for people who don't have the resources to invest in CRO really heavily. Because anyone can build a shop; it’s pretty easy.” - Ciara Ciez

Results

Using FERMÀT shops, mindbodygreen has simultaneously decreased CAC by 54%, while achieving a 23% increase in blended ROAS.

Since partnering with FERMÀT, mindbodygreen has increased the efficiency of – and significantly scaled – their paid ad spend, in addition to maximizing the value of each customer transacting. Check out the wins:

• 54% decrease in CAC
• 23% increase in blended ROAS
• 54% lift in subscription opt-in rate
• 2x scale in paid adspend

With FERMÀT, the mindbodygreen team not only achieved their goal of lowering CAC, but also implemented experiments that resulted in the growth of customer value. They plan to continue leveraging FERMAT as a key piece of their creative testing strategy, as well as running experiments to explore further sitewide performance gains. 

“The FERMAT experience has been pivotal to our growth over the past year. We've been able to scale our spend on Meta 2x, in large part due to the efficiency and scale that we're able to unlock with FERMAT.” - Ciara Ciez